Thinking about using these to illuminate a 215 gallon salt water fish tank. Bought a single 2 meter strip (120 LED's) to test with, and it got to the bottom of the tank, but only about 1/4 as bright as the 3 metal hallides are.
If I bought the 12 meter spool for $150, that would be 720 LED's.
each LED is rated 4.1 Lumens at 120 degree optic angle, 6500 Kelvin temperature.
How much brighter will 720 be from 120 LED's?
ALSO, I'll be doing the same length of blues, since it's for a salt water tank. So the blue LED's would also be 720 LED's at 1 lumen each centered on 120 degrees, 425nm.
Right now the tank has dual 14,000 kelvin and a single 20,000. All three are 250 watt metal halides.
Current metal halide lumens: 2x 18,500 + 10,500 = 47,500
lumen gain: -12.93x
brightness gain: -6.465x
So a full array of LED's will be almost 4 times brighter than the single strip
But the full array will be about 6 times darker than with the halides (assuming the halides are at 100% output)
Check me, please?
The tank is 72" long, 24" wide, and 29" tall.
I'd be stringing the LED's lengthwise
a 12 meter spool is 472.4 inches, and the segments are cutable every 50mm (1.96").
Call the LED span about 70 inches, that's 36 segments (108 LED's). There's 240 segments per reel, so I could get 6 2/3 spans out of a reel.
Using a reel of white and a reel of blue and only doing the 6 full spans of each reel, that's 12 spans. The tank is 24" wide, so it would be a strip every 2 inches, alternating white and blue. So the like-colored strips would be 4 inches apart.